A Free Man

(Norton; 230 pages; $24.95)

Much has been made in recent years of India's arrival on the world economic stage. Commentators in the United States like Thomas Friedman have included India as an important actor in "flattening the world," where, according to him, competition across the former lines of developed and developing countries has disappeared. And, as a concomitant, it is held true that lines of deprivation have a singular capacity to vanish, since everyone presumably has equal access to this equally flattened world.

Two important books serve as reminders that beneath the glitter of official India's economic aspirations to global presence, there is an underclass that still lives in the shadows of India's shine.

Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" shows us the honor and dignity through which the denizens of India's under-urban world negotiate their precarious lives in the arenas of rapid change in India - specifically in its few metropolises. Her account revolved lyrically around the struggles of Abdul Husain and his companions in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai. Following the publication of her book, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction, is "A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi," by Aman Sethi.

Both Boo and Sethi produce most appealing accounts of the lives of those ignored, turned-away-from, marginalized people toward whom - never mind Western knee-jerk opprobrium - even India's own self-righteous privileged classes seem to have had, to paraphrase a line from a popular television series, a serious "empathy bypass."

Sethi's book follows the fragmented bits he can garner of the life and times of Mohammed Ashraf. Sethi, a correspondent for the Indian daily newspaper the Hindu, first encounters Ashraf as a daily wage worker in one of Delhi's many old quarters whose vitality was extinguished by India's quest for modernity. "Sadar Bazar," writes Sethi, "shows up on tourist maps of Delhi as the large empty space between the backpacker haven of Paharganj and picturesque Chandni Chowk."

This is a world that harks back to another whose ligaments have now been torn. Sadar Bazar used to have its own connected life, we are told, linking the things that were made with things that were sold. It was disrupted in 2004 when the Indian state decided that "factory work" would not be allowed within "city limits."

The result of this coldly handed-down decision was to turn Sadar Bazar into simply a provider of labor, but labor that would not be recognized by the state. It became vagrancy, it became beggary. Such nebulous definitions made it possible to imprison large numbers of impoverished Indians into labor without recognition as production.

Ashraf actually lives in the hinterland of Sadar Bazar. When Sethi first meets him, Ashraf lives in Bara Tooti Chowk. Bara Tooti seems to be the underground of everything that makes the upper ground of middle- and upper-class Delhi tick. Providing labor that leaves no trace on the state's various registers in terms of providing the benefits of being citizens, he is living life at its most precarious. Like the marginalized poor in Boo's book, the characters in Sethi's do not even have homes; they spend their nights sleeping, dreaming and having nightmares on the few pavements that are available to them.

And, yet this precariously constructed world lives. And despite the grinding poverty of its denizens, it still arduously seeks ways to be free. Ashraf tells us pugnaciously, and repeatedly, that "the maalik owns our work. He does not own us."

Sethi brings to our attention the daily rhythms of the margins of a capital city. After a hard day of labor, "shops shut down their shutters, workers down their tools, and the world slowly heals itself in preparation for a long, bruising tomorrow." Ashraf and his friends need the night to recuperate not only from the hard physical labor they will perform on the following day but also to mend the daily bruises of humiliation resulting from seeing their dreams curtailed. Ashraf and his companions often take refuge in booze.

But when they wake up, even if sometimes from drunken stupors that last a few days, there is an entire network of trust they can rely on. Kaka runs a tea stall that can also, when the need arises, provide credit for the most basic daily needs. But Kaka is not always available as a banker-creditor; he has problems of his own.

A panoply of other workers demonstrate - each in ways that are their own, but almost incomprehensible to us reading their accounts from the perspective of our privileged lives - that extraordinary determination to ensure that poverty does not become an inescapable prison. And this is where the poignancy in the voices that Sethi has captured lies.

Sethi also challenges the monolithic idea of an underclass. There are categories within the underclass that must be acknowledged. Even more interestingly, as Sethi's conversations with Ashraf and his companions demonstrate, the commitment to the "growth of India" is not simply the project of the vainglorious middle classes. As Sethi seeks to help Ashraf in Calcutta to find the tools of his trade - lost through a series of misadventures - Ashraf says: "The only problem is that you can't find scrap anymore. China is buying everything. ... How will India become great if we keep selling everything to the Chinese?"

This is a struggle to find freedom that is conducted with a deep sense of honor among individuals, with compassion, and through pain and deprivation. Sethi's powerful book acknowledges, without empty celebration, these struggles. It is not for us to judge what constitutes freedom in any individual's understanding. It behooves us simply to recognize that the constant will of every human being in every circumstance is to seek a way to live in an unfree world with the urge to reverse that constraining world.